A Little Update on the Status of My Life

/blows dust gently off dark corners of blog
/becomes entangled in mass of spiderwebs
/screams as gigantic black spider emerges from the shadows and waggles legs threateningly in my face

Ahem.

Anyway. The reason I’ve been missing for so long is that I was mired in actually writing — and completing — my manuscript. That’s right, I didn’t write because I WAS WRITING. I was determined to meet my goal of finishing the damn thing, doing revisions, getting it out to beta readers, doing more revisions…

But more on that later.

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First, PUBLICATION NEWS!

Fixi Novo’s Little Basket 2017 has just launched at the London Book Fair! I have a short story in this called Pantang, which explores that very particular grief you experience when you lose a child. It’s probably the most personal story I’ve ever written, containing the shards and splinters of my own grief borne of my miscarriage years ago. You can get it online here.

Click for image source.

Also pleased to have made it into Bill Adler Jr’s The Binge Watching Cure, with the delightful premise of stories that start small (at about 100 words) and grow longer (up to 25,000). The reasoning being that the only way to break your addiction to binge watching is by slowly working your way up until you’re flying through War & Peace-length masterpieces. Like dipping a toe into fiction! My short story, Byproducts, fills the 1,500-word slot and is about refugees, but mostly about food and the way it’s tied to memory and meaning and love and home. There’s no release date for this yet, although it’s meant to be out this year, but you can find out more about it here.

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Second, NOVEL NEWS!

So, since we last spoke, I’ve done it. THE WEIGHT OF OUR SKY (which is the working title until and unless someone who knows these things better than I do tells me otherwise) is complete at about 59,000 words, has gone through a couple of rounds of edits and revisions, and…is…currently being queried.

Yes, that’s right, I did it. I jumped right into querying the manuscript. It’s been a week, and from the 20-odd that I’ve emailed (trembling, and with great trepidation), I’ve gotten five requests for the full manuscript, three for a partial manuscript, and two rejections. The first full request came three hours after I’d sent the query.

I don’t know how to explain my feelings about this. Overjoyed, obviously, that there are people out there who think my story has promise. Terrified that after all that, nobody will want to represent me because the manuscript is a steaming pile of shit. Anxiously refreshing my inbox every five minutes. Annoyed that I’m trying to write something new and keep getting distracted by refreshing my inbox every five minutes. SO MANY FEELINGS.

But nevertheless, until that magical moment that an agent actually offers me representation, I’m going to try and forge on with this writing business and get stuck into my second novel. Wish me luck.